Description of problem:
libaio 0.3.98 and above return -1 and set errno upon return from the
io_* system calls. libaio 0.3.96 and below returned -errno. This is
an ABI breakage that affects all previously built users of the
library, as no symbol version or .so version has changed.
Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
0.3.98 and above
How reproducible:
Every time. All users see errors of EPERM (-1).
Additional info:
The right answer would have been to bump the .so version, or better,
leave the non-errno-hampered calling convention.

I've just built a new version of libaio into fc3 which should address
this issue: libaio-0.3.102-1. You can get this version and build it
from CVS if you want to test it early:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rhlinux.redhat.com:/usr/local/CVS co libaio
I built and did simple regression tests on i386, x86_64, ia64, s390,
s390x, ppc64pseries.
To be clear, the agreed-upon solution was to change back to the old
behaviour of returning -errno.

It would appear that the soname for the package has changed. This
means that the file-based dependancies for the package list
libaio.so.1.0.0
instead of
libaio.so.1
This causes problems both for installing packages that have a
find-requires dependancy on libaio.so.1 and for running programs that
have libaio.so.1 in their dynamic headers. Any program compiled
against the older version will have fun issues.

I've tested programs built and linked against libaio-0.3.96-5 on a system
running libaio-0.3.102-2, and they run fine.
Changing the soname was an error on my part, to be sure. However, please
elaborate on what problems this will cause for you. What is a find-requires
dependency? Can this issue be fixed with a Provides line in the spec file?
Thanks for your enduring patience on this matter.

Well, Thorsten from Novell says that a program linked against libaio-0.3.9x from
SLES8 fails to work with libaio-0.3.102. I've not checked fully on what the
reason is, given that I haven't had time to test. I'll make sure that I follow
up, because I'm the one playing ping/pong between the two vendors to make sure
that libaio behavior is consistent.
As far as the find-requires bit goes, I'm talking about RPM file-based
dependancies. Any RPM package that depends on libaio.so.1 (so generated from
RPM's find-requires script seeing libaio-0.3.9x) will perhaps have a problem
when libaio-0.3.102 only provides libaio.so.1.0.0.